Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Boom goes London; Boom, Paree!

From today's Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman:

"Bush Proposes $27M To Jumpstart New Nuclear Weapons Program"

"On the military front, Bush's budget also calls for $27 million to help jumpstart the country’s first new nuclear weapons program in 20 years. The money will be used to fund a competition between the Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories to find and design a new generation of nuclear bombs to replace the country’s entire nuclear arsenal."

I believe I heard the Bush administration's list of leading contenders to serve as test sites for detonation of this new generation of terrifying weapons. Some of those I remember hearing mentioned were:

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Can't resist Edgar A. Poe, Masque of the Red Death: "And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all." D.K.

No, it's just the last paragraph of his short story, "The Masque of the Red Death", but really the whole story is aPOEpriate to our times (aargh). Offhand, I don't recall "The History of Mankind". D.K.

THE BEGINNING IS NEAR

HUH?

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.

"Keep in mind that this planet is no model for rational thought, and that what passes for sanity here is sending chills down the spine of the remainder of the universe." E.T. 101

"An Empire’s power depends on its ability to control the cultural stories and language that shape our collective understanding of our world and our choices as a species. Empire stories induce a kind of cultural trance that conditions us to accept the dominator relations of Empire as just and righteous and to dismiss talk of alternatives as naïve, dangerous, or even sinful." ~ David Korten